Tony Parisi one of the co-creators of VRML, reviews “COLLADA: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation”. Quoting from the review: “...the laser-focus of the COLLADA design team seems to have paid off: the industry now has a common exchange format for game assets, and there is hope yet for developers who would rather spend their time building games than building tools to make games. This clarity of focus on the design comes through in the book as well. ... A detailed and lucid book that explains COLLADA from concept through implementation. If you are a programmer with a reasonable understanding of 3D graphics programming and/or authoring using 3D scene graphs, you will be able to learn the basics of COLLADA. If you are an experienced 3D toolmaker, COLLADA contains everything you need to get up and running to build your game, game engine or content pipeline tool. If you are a manager or decision maker, you get the added comfort of knowing that — finally — you just might be able to write that tool once and not over and over again.”

Updated release notes for COLLADA 1.4.1 are now available (Release Notes Revision A). These notes offer corrections and additions to the earlier release notes, and are all indicated by colored shading.

The Sun Java Wireless Toolkit is a set of tools for creating Java applications that run on devices compliant with the Java Technology for the Wireless Industry specification. It consists of build tools, utilities, and a device emulator. The latest Beta 2 release adds support for the Mobile Service Architecture (JSR 248), admvance multimedia supplement, internationalization, and Java Bindings for the OpenGL ES API (JSR 239).

Google has just released the latest beta for Google Earth 4. Google Earth 4 adds a simpler interface, time animation, enhanced layers, GIS data importing, compressed textures, movie making, and drawing tools. The latest beta adds a progress indicator, real-time GPS tracking, and greatly improved performance for COLLADA models (textured buildings). Available for OS X, Linux and Windows XP.

Futuremark Corporation has been selected to create the OpenKODE Conformance Test Suite. The OpenKODE conformance testing tools will enable mobile device chip makers, handset manufacturers and middleware vendors to confirm that their products conform to the OpenKODE 1.0 media stack specification and will include trans-API conformance tests to ensure that OpenKODE implementations support rich mixing of media types such as real-time video being processed in a 3D application. The suite of conformance testing tools will be made available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program and products that pass all the tests may use the OpenKODE trademark. OpenKODE 1.0 is expected to be publicly released in the first quarter of 2007.

The Mobile Game Innovation Hunt will give 12-15 mobile developers and publishers the opportunity to pitch their most innovative game to a panel of expert judges and the audience in three-minutes! Submit your Khronos API-accelerated mobile game by January 15 to participate and for a chance to win cool prizes.

The OpenKODE 1.0 draft specification is available for limited public review. If you are interested in evaluating this draft release and contributing feedback, apply now to take part in the reviewer program. If you application is approved, you will receive a IP/non-disclosure agreement which you simply need to sign and return. You will then be able to download the OpenKODE 1.0 draft and give feedback on the reviewers email list.


You are encouraged to first review the lastest OpenKODE presentation and OpenKODE podcast


What is OpenKODE? OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL ES and OpenVG Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES and OpenMAX media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.
English press release

Japanese press release

Simplified Chinese press release

The Japanese translation of the COLLADA 1.4.1 specification is now available. You can download the Japanese translation from the COLLADA page as well as access the COLLADA DOM and the RT FX, and Refinery developer tools and code.

GBenchmark v1.0 is 3D performance benchmark suite for OpenGL ES compatible Brew, Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. The new benchmark not only measures OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 application performance, but also allows direct side-by-sdie comparison of native OpenGL ES and Java (M3G) based mobile 3D implementations. It can also be used to find performance bottlenecks. GLBenchmark is available as free networked-only, corporate and stategic (source code) versions. Check out the latest posted lperformance results.

The presentations from the full day Khronos Media Acceleration Forum in Cambridge UK are now online. These presentations include OpenKODE, a non-technical introduction to OpenGL ES, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, OpenSL ES overview, a technical overview of OpenGL ES 1.1, a technical overview of OpenMAX DL, IL and AL, how shader programmability with OpenGL ES 2.0 can boost overall system level performance, and high-performance 3D graphics coding for handheld devices.

This article describes the impact of hardware accelerated OpenGL ES (from Imagination Technologies) on the quality and performance of graphics on the Sony Ericsson’s UIQ 3 phones. The obvious gain is in the quality of 3D graphics, including texture filtering, anti-aliasing and faster drawing. The other important gain is in software performance. With hardware accelerated OpenGL ES, the CPU is only running the phone OS and the game logic and not the the rendering. As a result the CPU can spend more time on the gaming experience; developers can implement more complex game play, improve artificial intelligence and use richer audio effects.

Episode #4 in the Khronos Mobile Media Developer podcast series focuses on OpenMAX DL - a standard to enable rapid porting of codecs to new platforms. OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) APIs contains a comprehensive set of audio, video and imaging functions that can be optimized by platform developers for new CPUs, hardware engines, and DSPs. Developers can then use the APIs to create portable accelerated codec functionality such as MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC and JPEG. They can port the codec to a new platform simply by getting the appropriate platform library.


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Episode #3 in the Khronos Mobile Media Developer podcast series focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 - programmable 3D shaders for mobile devices. OpenGL ES 2.0 introduces the majority of the functionality used by today’s desktop games but with a streamlined API for the embedded space. This audio or video podcast from the 2006 Game Developers Conference, reviews in detail what has changed in OpenGL ES 2.0 and what the changes mean for mobile game development.


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Aplix will integrate its JBlend Java platform with NVIDIA’s GoForce handheld GPUs and JSR solutions from Hybrid and third-party partners to provide optimal Java and graphics performance for mobile devices. NVIDIA will distribute this complete Java graphics solution to its network of mobile content developers, and both companies will promote the jointly developed package to OEM customers. The cooperative agreement covers M3G - Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME (JSR 184), Java bindings to OpenGL ES (JSR 239) and Java bindings to SVG for scalable vector graphics (JSR 226).

The International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA) today announced the 25 games that have been shortlisted to enter into the next stage of the competition. Five games from each of the following categories were selected: the Best Interactive Experience Award, the Best Use of Connectivity, the Excellence in 3D Award, the Most Innovative Game Award and the Best Use of Flash Award.